


Augment

by tielan



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-26
Updated: 2015-04-26
Packaged: 2018-03-25 20:53:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3824716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life goes on. That’s the point of wizardry, isn’t it?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Augment

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NightsMistress](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/gifts).



> This is not quite the story I wanted to write about these characters, but it's the story I have right now. I hope you enjoy it!

Life goes on.

That’s the point of wizardry, isn’t it?

Oh, some things change a little.

* * *

 

Summer slinks its way through the sky and the hills.

Kit and Dairine go back home. Nita follows them a few days later, the slight smile she gives him the day before she leaves as much a question as an answer. Ronan’s not sure how he feels about that. Attraction to a girl like Nita – a fellow wizard, and a gifted one at that – isn’t going to be simple.

He goes to hang out with his friends, laughs and jokes with them, and follows his wizardry.

It seems like almost nothing has changed.

Almost.

* * *

 

His ‘passenger’ (and he has to find a better way to phrase that because ‘the Champion’ sounds overdone when applied to himself and everything else sounds wrong) suggests turning the Spear into a pen. Nobody looks twice at a pen in a guy’s pocket (unless it’s glowing, which it doesn’t).

 _It’s both a seeming and not,_ comes the explanation as they’re refining the wizardry, _the Spear is and isn’t a physical object, so it can both exist and not-exist in the physical world at the same time – like it’s own claudication within itself._

Ronan doesn’t care what it is so long as it doesn’t burn a hole in his pocket – or his chest.

Although it doesn’t come to him for a few weeks, and then...

_Wait a moment. The spear is mightier than the pen? Really?_

He feels the shrug in his bones. _The One loves puns, you know._

Ronan didn’t until then. The idea of the Highest Power having a sense of humour is both weird and comforting.

* * *

 

Some things change a lot.

* * *

 

He’s still on active status as a Senior, of course, which means the juggle of usual life with wizardry, and the occasional call to errantry.

Errantry, this time, which takes him halfway across the universe.

For someone who’s never been out of Ireland before, the Crossings is a very different experience. And the situation that got him here—

Ronan doesn’t remember the hours of his Ordeal, the long and difficult fight with the sea, with his body, with himself and the things he’d always professed to believe, but he remembers what it felt like afterwards, lying on the headland, shaking with the strain.

It’s not him this time – not his Ordeal, not his planet. But his body and mind feels the struggle, even as he watches the Usidal wizards – all two of them – tremble with the force of holding together the planetary atmosphere as this planet’s moons line up in a row with their star, a once-in-a-billion years line-up, to which a micro-black hole has added its gravitational pull, far far out beyond the star’s heliopause.

The connection is complicated and stretched thing through time and space, but one of the wizards from back home – Morgan Cochrane – did her Ordeal out here decades ago, back when the Usidal had no wizards at all. And when they faced a threat that their single wizard couldn’t handle, they called in for backup.

In the back of Ronan’s head, the echoes of the spellworkings linger, like the faintest echo of sound in his headphones, even when the music’s not playing. It underpins the entirety of his being, the wizardry being worked with his strength – not even his own conceiving, but that of the young Usidal wizard whose idea it was.

And, in the way of the Powers That Be, a wizard came to them with the specialty they needed.

Around them, across the frost-spangled grass, the spell they’ve wrought glows in smoke and light, the simple script of the Speech containing the entirety of this working – ‘described and circumscribed’ as the Usidal wizard said with a faint smile.

Ronan can see the crisp syllables in his head, the power of the working in the lettering: rough, but ready. As he recites the spell, his purely verbal component is woven into the Usidal working, reinforcing the visual segment being performed by the Usidal youngling and the complicated harmonic vibrations being emitted by the Usidal wizard.

If he looks, he can see the new additions to his name in the Speech, a subtle change in the shape of the characters, the shift in his awareness of the Being embodied in him.

He never thought his wizardly signature would need the correction until the Usidal wizard noted that his description didn’t circumscribe him very well, and asked about the change.

The working rattles – that’s the best description of it, like a resonance in his bones that warns him that the working isn’t holding.

_Can you help?_

The answer comes after a moment, bright as a star within him, _Yes._

_But?_

_You must relinquish your control_.

The thought shudders within him, making a battlefield of his insides. Giving in? Giving up? Letting the Champion take him over again, use him as a vessel, poured out until it’s empty? He doesn’t want that.

No response comes from the Champion. It doesn’t need to – it’s irrelevant.

Ronan’s already made that choice once before, for Earth. And now he stands beneath an atmosphere he can’t breathe, but which a planet of two million beings call home and whose atmosphere will be torn from their sky if this wizardry fails.

_In Life’s name and for Life’s sake..._

He doesn’t quite know what happens – wielding the Spear is a blurry memory of light and pain and a burning righteousness, tinged with fury that Balor was doing this to his land and his people and his world. This is something else – not a loss of control but something else.

 _This does not describe,_ said the Usidal wizard as he looked from Ronan to the signature and back to Ronan. _It is most, yes, but not quite correct. Change has come, augment._

‘Augment’ is the word that best describes what’s happening – the sense that he is filled full, only to continue to fill without overflowing, until it seems that he must burst at the seams from the influx of power. And yet it doesn’t split him, only pushes at him, everywhere, expanding him beyond what he thought he could take.

He augments, with the power of the One’s Champion, and feels the workings renew, strengthen, hold.

They hold through to the very end of the conjunction – nearly six hours on Earth according to his watch. Ronan is shaking by the end of it, sitting down in the spellwork, the force and power of the Champion pouring through him, until an appendage pats his shoulder – the Usidal wizard craning zir head to look him in the eye since ze is so much taller than him, with a prehensile neck.

Appendage it might be, but the patting needs no translation.

 _Augment,_ ze says with what Ronan is pretty sure is a smile.


End file.
